Nerd about the fediverse, based in Portland, Oregon. 🌲 Nice to meet you! 👋
Blog & Podcast: jaredwhite.com
On Mastodon: @jaredwhite@indieweb.social
I’m squarely in the AT protocol is not the Fediverse camp. Fine if people want to enjoy Bluesky, but the Fediverse is built on top of the W3C protocol ActivityPub. AT is incompatible. Cool that there’s a bridge, but a bridge between incompatible protocols will always be a bit of a hack in my book.
I’m totally fine with the SWF engaging with Meta just like they would any other entity building software using ActivityPub.
Funding on the other hand is a different story. It sounds like Meta contributed to an overall fund in order to launch the SWF. OK, I suppose — but if there’s specific funding down the road for some specific project or funding in some way which appears to influence decision-making on which projects to work on or how to approach them, that’s when I have a huge problem with it.
Oh yeah, thanks for bringing that up. And maybe we stay away from WordPress.com now with all the weird AI stuff they’ve been up to. 🤪
I all for removing barriers to entry in this space, and if you’re talking about self-hosting everything and wiring up all sorts of bits and bobs of various services together manually, yeah, it’s very technical and daunting. But somebody can get started on Ghost, or WordPress.com, or Buttondown, or ConvertKit or whatever. Lots of ways to write early and often online. Buzzsprout is pretty rad for podcasting as well.
The problem usually boils down to distribution like Nilay said, not hosting. Fediverse seems like a real solution here. Honestly I’ve never been as successful at both blogging and podcasting as I am right now. This isn’t merely a glimpse of some old-school internet nostalgia trip. It’s a whole new world out there and it’s actually better. 🤩
I’m a blogger and a web developer, so IMHO:
Blog-style sites have never been as cheap to run as right now. For small-to-midsize sites run mostly as static sites, it might even be close to free.
Virtually all cost is in the human labor, and the challenge of running a sustainable business model like subscriptions off of “words” which I think are valuable but getting audiences to agree is very hard.
But we might be seeing a turnaround here. I’m hopeful!
You seem to be incorrectly stating what is on Wikipedia, which leads:
That last bit is absolutely key: a collection of services using a common protocol. Imagine if two different email servers didn’t both speak SMTP. Imagine if two different web services didn’t both speak HTTP. The Internet as a singular entity is only made possible because of protocol interop between all of its constituent parts.
To say “the fediverse” is comprised of multiple incompatible protocols goes against that grain, and to go back to pre-ActivityPub-as-W3C-specification days as an argument that it’s fine to label multiple incompatible protocols as all being components of “the fediverse” is a stretch.
To me, this isn’t a let’s-agree-to-disagree-issue, honestly. While the term “fediverse” is arguably colloquial and doesn’t necessarily imply any specific technical attributes, it ceases to be useful as a term if Fediverse Platform A cannot in any way communicate with Fediverse Platform B because the two platforms happen to be using 100% incompatible protocols. Aside from a third-party bridge, the AT protocol used by Bluesky is 100% incompatible with ActivityPub used by Mastodon, Threads, and others. Therefore, they cannot both be simultaneously services in the fediverse.